The News From Woolybucket

WHEN Bob Dollar's parents abandon him at the age of 8 on a doorstep in Denver, he has arrived at the threshold of two things: his Uncle Tam's junk shop and Annie Proulx's fourth novel. And, to be sure, ''That Old Ace in the Hole'' has a lot in common with the Used but Not Abused thrift store. The proprietor, Tambourine Bapp, and his partner, the marvelous grump Wayne (Bromo) Redpoll -- once thrown off a plane for his militant refusal to lower his window shade and ever at work on an essay entitled ''This Land Is NOT Your Land'' -- specialize in ''Art Plastics,'' for which they have set aside a special chamber in their shop. The Art Plastics room contains such treasures as Bakelite radios and jewelry, but also, ''on floor pedestals, as if sculptures . . . plastic washing-machine agitators, black and white.'' Bob's uncle explains that ''one day . . . people will collect plastic objects from the 20th century as art, like now they are going after wooden grain cradles and windmill weights.'' For Proulx, it isn't odd bits of large appliances that cry out for a curator, it's the texture of working-class rural life.

Proulx wrote about New England farmers in her first novel, ''Postcards,'' and about the residents of a Newfoundland fishing town in her Pulitzer Prize winner, ''The Shipping News.'' Her short-story collection ''Close Range'' cast a cool eye on the rough lives of Westerners, mostly Wyoming cowboys and ranchers. In ''That Old Ace in the Hole'' she memorializes the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles: high, flat country where the prairie still lingers even though the grasslands have been harried by cattle, oil rigs and agribusiness for over 150 years. She has collected quite a pile of stuff -- history, economics, folkways and local lore -- to shoehorn into this novel, and the result is decidedly lumpy.

''That Old Ace in the Hole'' starts out pleasantly enough, a nice ride through the rolling country of anecdote and eccentricity. The weather descriptions, though frequent, are brief, and there is hardly any geology -- one of the deadlier preoccupations of regional literature. Since she shifted her focus westward, Proulx's prose has lost the Anglo-Saxon knobbiness of ''Postcards'' and ''The Shipping News,'' books with amputee sentences that read as if someone had attacked them with a cleaver, determined to chop off their subjects and verbs. Her style is now rangier and more discursive, as if delivered by someone leaning over a fence rail rather than by someone hurrying to get the wood chopped before the onset of nine months of snow. She still goes in for goofy names, but there are fewer that sound as if they belong to hobbits (Froggy Dibden, Mrs. Stinchcomb) and more that sound like the monikers of strippers or rodeo clowns (Babe Vanderslice, Harry Howdiboy and the truly inexcusable Francis Scott Keister).

To his chagrin, Bob Dollar reaches the age of 25 without any particular sense of what he wants to do with his life; this anxious vagueness is almost his only character trait. Having landed a job with the multinational Global Pork Rind corporation, he is sent down to the panhandles in a company car to scope out possible sites for factory hog farms. The locals, says his boss, Ribeye Cluke, ''have been brainwashed by the Sierra Club to think that hog facilities are bad,'' so he needs to be ''as circumspect as possible'' about his true mission: befriending the neighborhood gossips and notables and looking for the ''farmers whose kids went off to school and those kids are not coming back unless somebody puts a gun to their heads.'' Bob stumbles upon the town of Woolybucket, Tex., where he rents a rustic bunkhouse -- no running water or electricity -- from a talkative widow named LaVon Fronk, and he starts to poke around.

So far, it's an agreeable journey, but then, about 90 pages in, the novel hits a wide, dull stretch of potted history and exposition on topics like the Ogallala aquifer, pivot irrigators and the principal crops of the region (wheat seed, sorghum, soybeans, peanuts and cotton, if you were wondering). This is mostly conveyed by unconvincing dialogue and by Bob's letters to the home office, but there are also big chunks of it in raw form, sentences -- The flood of people came with the railroads, small farmers who believed that drought and wind could be overcome by hard work and the plow'' -- that sound like the voice-over on an old educational film strip.

IT just so happens that LaVon Fronk is putting together a multivolume work she calls ''The Woolybucket Rural Compendium'' and therefore has heaps of historical documents in her house, as well as scads of regional legends stuffed in her head. In addition to this ''faded panhandle Scheherazade,'' there's the gang down at the Old Dog Cafe, a passel of sound-alike ranchers ever ready to explain regional water policy: ''Hell, we ain't like California where they got central irrigation and water co-ops.'' And then there's the Round Robin Baptist Bible Quilt Circle, ladies whose conversation about disastrously failed permanent waves, killer tornadoes and the evil doings at ''abortion parlors'' is a bit juicier. Despite his promisingly Dickensian upbringing, Bob is just a filament on which to string assorted tales of 10-mule freight wagons, lovesick cowboys, box socials and frontier voter fraud. He's an outsider and ''a sucker for stories told'' who will sit at the feet of the old-timers and plead for more.

The novel's acknowledgments suggest that Proulx once did much the same thing and came away smitten with the panhandles, the regional folklore and the operational details of such items as wind-powered water pumps. ''That Old Ace in the Hole'' is her paean to all that, a loving record of an evaporating way of life. The cause is worthy, but why she chose a novel for her vehicle instead of what the material seems to dictate, a nonfiction book about the people of the high plains and the author's travels among them, is another question. Why fiction, when the book's driving impulse is documentary in nature and when Proulx's heart really isn't in the long narrative of Bob Dollar and his implausible quest? (No one could believe for one minute that he'll end up helping to install a vile, polluting hog farm in Woolybucket.) She used a similar device in ''The Shipping News,'' but, despite the slenderness of that novel's premise (a widower finding new love), it managed to carry the book. Decent, indecisive Bob can't do the same here.

It's not as if Proulx has lost her touch. When ''That Old Ace in the Hole'' occasionally slips into full-blooded fiction -- in chapters, for example, where Proulx describes the arrival of the first Fronk in the region or a farm wife's sudden, overwhelming lust for a cowhand -- it really comes alive. Any one of the dozens of yarns crammed into ''That Old Ace in the Hole'' would probably make a captivating novel or short story; it's Proulx's determination to jam all of them between the book's covers that bogs things down.

Then again, however unsung the panhandles may be, the tales told here -- of wayward cowpokes, stubborn ranchers, leather-tough women, temperamental horses, plagues of locusts, family farms devoured by nefarious conglomerates and creeping environmental threats -- are all pretty familiar. The really savory morsels in ''That Old Ace in the Hole'' aren't about the panhandles at all. There's a charming account of the Sunday night ritual of the proprietors of the Used but Not Abused thrift store, a rapt viewing of ''Antiques Roadshow.'' And then there's Orlando Bunnel, Bob Dollar's school friend, an ''evil fat boy'' who introduces him to movies like ''Rat Women'' and ''The Corpse Grinders'' (the former zestily synopsized by Proulx). Orlando is sent to prison for hacking into the computers of the Colorado office of the United States Forest Service and diverting all its funds to a Nevada bordello, then gets rich while incarcerated by making a CD in which sample recordings of flatulence cover classic rock songs. (''We had one guy was a real star. Nothing he couldn't do -- basso profundo to coloratura, whistles and quavers, tremolo.'') When Orlando materializes late in the book, trying to lure Bob off to Austin, it's clear that our hero is a better man for staying on and getting involved with preserving the native flora and fauna of the prairie. But you can't help wishing he'd taken that evil fat boy up on his offer.